Kill Your Timid Notion 07
An International Festival of Experimental Music, Film and Visual Art
KYTN was a festival of sound and image. Over 4 days we explored many different and experimental ways in which artists, filmmakers and musicians could investigate the border between what is visible and what is audible. And in particular, we looked at the margins, at the leading edge of creativity where people test the boundaries of what has been done before, and define those boundaries anew for themselves.
Each of the artists who appeared at KYTN 07 pursue their own personal artistic obsessions, and we chose to work with them because we think that the fruit borne of those obsessions are often unique, affecting discoveries that can confound and exhilarate; that can bemuse, enliven and charm.
Those discoveries might be found in an audio signal coursing through an electro-magnet and causing nails to hurl about or the swarming multitude of interference built up from candles and light sensitive oscillators.
ReadThe festival included performances from William Raban, Keith Evans & Loren Chasse, Joe Colley, Andrew Lampert -, Kanta Horio, Ken Jacobs & Eric La Casa, AVVA (Toshimaru Nakamura & Billy Roisz), LEVOX (Etienne Caire, Gaëlle Rouard & eRikm) and Light Trap (Greg Pope with Norbert Möslang, Xavier Quérel, Christophe Cardoen & Christophe Auger)
The talks programme included Brian Dillon, Brian Morton, Ken Hollings and Ken Jacobs chatting with Edwin Carels.
Plus folks from no.w.here led a couple of workshops on Cameraless film techniques and Photograms.
KYTN 07 was reviewed by Brian Morton for the Wire here
Programme Events
Beyond 6281
ARTIFICIEL
Audio signals pass through light bulbs, causing the filaments of the bulbs to sing and crackle in a chorus of electronic static.
Chord of the Fifth Force
Barry Weisblat
A drone installation populated by flourescent strip lights working in complicity with analogue radios – “all the lights just do their thing”.
The Cube
Christophe Cardoen Etienne Caire Gaëlle Rouard Jerome Noetinger Kris Auger Lionel Marchetti Xavier Quérel
The Cube is a 6 hour performed installation in which sound and image are treated as independent but equal, where musicians and filmmakers sit alongside each other, improvise to and feed off both projected image and amplified and acoustic sound.
KYTN Salon: Post Consideration
Andrew Lampert Edwin Carels Eric La Casa John Harris Prof. Heike Sperling Zoe Irvine
Post consideration and post rationalisation… How do we think about experimental music and film after the performance?
Wave Formations
William Raban
Wave Formations is a 5 screen work in which each screen runs through a series of fades and then stroboscopic flashes of colour, to create a series of visual harmonics.
Keith Evans & Coelacanth
Keith Evans Loren Chasse
A system in which film is projected onto copper strips, captured again and then re-projected as video, somehow transforming the original imagery into molasses-slow, molten and incredibly tactile flickers of colour and light.
Shutter Interface
Paul Sharits
Paul Sharits’ Shutter Interface is a multi screen installation born of an intent to reveal the material substance of cinema in its purest form: spatially.
Joe Colley
Joe Colley
Joe Colley specialises in hotwired sound constructions full of ominous electronic disturbances and caustic, noxious drones. For KYTN, Joe created a situation of controlled chaos with 50 light sensitive oscillators placed in a field of candles.
Brian Dillon Talk
Brian Dillon
Join Brian as he ruminates on the history of how experimental filmmakers and sound artists have drifted into and taken over galleries in order to show their work.
Film Programme 1: In + Out
Guy Sherwin Various Artists
Includes: a polish counting lesson, around NYC with D A Pennebaker, a portrait of a tower block, a man with a spade, at home with KYTN regular Guy Sherwin, a cinematic Blair Witchish cut-up and a song for some swings.
Film Programme 2: Humans
Ken Jacobs Various Artists John Smith
Includes: street portraits of kids in 1930’s Dakota, a mysterious foggy pilgrimage, a swarm of time-lapsed consumers, a stereoscopic analysis of mill life, up close and personal in a Lighting Bolt mosh pit.
Hope and Prey
Daniel Menche Vanessa Renwick
Life and death dramas unfold in the snowy American North, using three-screen documentary footage and a soundtrack by KYTN favourite, vocalist Daniel Menche.
Film Programme 3: Earth
Various Artists Ian Helliwell
Includes: solar flares, insect fireworks, a new film from Ian Helliwell, pulsating glaciers, an apple being eaten alive, sea ravaged stock, crushed blackberries and film that has literally risen from the grave.
Andrew Lampert with Steve Beresford, Okkyung Lee & Mark Saunders
Andrew Lampert Okkyung Lee Steve Beresford
A performance for projectionist, musicians and audience, which plays with references to Oscar Levant and Gershwin: apparently a series of small doses of chaos.
Surface Tension
William Raban
Relative patterns of occlusion and exposure occupy two screens. Each exposure fires a stroboscopic flash of colour: yellow for one screen; blue for the other, filling the centre of both screens with colour, haloed with after-images.
Ken Jacobs & Eric La Casa
Eric La Casa Ken Jacobs
Ken presents his Nervous Magic Lantern, wherein film itself is forsaken for an investigation of hypnotic and trancelike crystaline forms. Eric La Casa works with recordings of everyday occurrences: the background hum of place.
EM No.3 and Round Trip
Kanta Horio
Kanta is a young Japanese artist with a home-made, short circuited take on electronics and physical phenomena which he uses in performance to produce close circuit systems of audio / video feedback.
Ken Hollings Talk
Ken Hollings
A talk entitled ‘The Conquest of the Universe’: which delves into the connections between the underground filmmakers and musicians in New York in the early 1960s
Film Programme 4: Beyond Image
Various Artists
Includes: a classic of innovative computer graphics, ex-pat Scot McLaren on form, a riotous psychedelic oil show with a Soft Machine accompaniment, subtle manipulation of data feedback, a colourful road movie and a reworking of a lost Paul Sharits film.
Film Programme 5: Word
Emma Hart Guy Sherwin Paul Sharits Various Artists John Smith
Includes: a £20 note, stock fluctuations, an examination of words in the video medium, a linguistic challenge for your mind, a frame by frame dissection 50 words, shop front poetry, image and language head to head and newspapers under the microscope.
Lost Sound: Graeme Miller + John Smith
Various Artists
Ever wondered about the roadside festoons which are the innards of discarded cassette tapes? All will be revealed in this methodical and insightful documentary by UK luminary John Smith and sound artist cohort Graeme Miller.
Film Programme 6: Contrast
Various Artists Guy Sherwin
Includes: tamed TV snow, video feedback of racing particles, a remake of a polish photogram film destroyed in WWII, a visual and aural representation of Gestalt theory, hole-punched film and Guy Sherwin’s Cycles 3 double-projection.
Ken Jacobs & Edwin Carels Talk
Edwin Carels Ken Jacobs
Ken Jacobs chats to Edwin Carels: Edwin is a curator based in Ghent, responsible for some fantastic programmes of experimental film and art at the Rotterdam Film festival (amongst others).
AVVA
Billy Roisz Toshimaru Nakamura
AVVA sees the internal feedback of Toshi’s no-input mixing desk is fed to Billy, and transformed into bright and variegated patters, striations and blooming colour, before being fed back to Toshi and manipulated on route to the PA.
LEVOX
eriKm Etienne Caire Gaëlle Rouard
Imagery, drawn from what seems like hundreds of different films is overlaid and combined in a promissory rainbow of new meanings and impossible scenarios, with the unsettling feel of daylight shadows.
Light Trap
Greg Pope Norbert Möslang
Out of a dark haze, shafts of lights are picked out from the surface of film. Out of the black silence, noise, audible scratches bloom into a bright drone of broken and cracked objects.